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About The Vagrants

In luminous prose, award-winning author Yiyun Li weaves together the lives of unforgettable characters who are forced to make moral choices, and choices for survival, in China in the late 1970s.

Shortlisted for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Morning dawns on the provincial city of Muddy River. A young woman, Gu Shan, a bold spirit and a follower of Chairman Mao, has renounced her faith in Communism. Now a political prisoner, she is to be executed for her dissent. Her distraught mother, determined to follow the custom of burning her only child’s clothing to ease her journey into the next world, is about to make another bold decision. Shan’s father, Teacher Gu, who has already, in his heart and mind, buried his rebellious daughter, begins to retreat into memories. Neither of them imagines that their daughter’s death will have profound and far-reaching effects, in Muddy River and beyond.

In luminous prose, Yiyun Li weaves together the lives of these and other unforgettable characters, including a serious seven-year-old boy, Tong; a crippled girl named Nini; the sinister idler Bashi; and Kai, a beautiful radio news announcer who is married to a man from a powerful family. Life in a world of oppression and pain is portrayed through stories of resilience, sacrifice, perversion, courage, and belief. We read of delicate moments and acts of violence by mothers, sons, husbands, neighbors, wives, lovers, and more, as Gu Shan’s execution spurs a brutal government reaction.

Writing with profound emotion, and in the superb tradition of fiction by such writers as Orhan Pamuk and J. M. Coetzee, Yiyun Li gives us a stunning novel that is at once a picture of life in a special part of the world during a historic period, a universal portrait of human frailty and courage, and a mesmerizing work of art.

Praise for The Vagrants

“She bridges our world to the Chinese world with a mind that is incredibly supple and subtle.”—W Magazine

“A Balzacian look at one community’s suppressed loves and betrayals.”—Vogue

About The Vagrants

In luminous prose, award-winning author Yiyun Li weaves together the lives of unforgettable characters who are forced to make moral choices, and choices for survival, in China in the late 1970s.

Shortlisted for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Morning dawns on the provincial city of Muddy River. A young woman, Gu Shan, a bold spirit and a follower of Chairman Mao, has renounced her faith in Communism. Now a political prisoner, she is to be executed for her dissent. Her distraught mother, determined to follow the custom of burning her only child’s clothing to ease her journey into the next world, is about to make another bold decision. Shan’s father, Teacher Gu, who has already, in his heart and mind, buried his rebellious daughter, begins to retreat into memories. Neither of them imagines that their daughter’s death will have profound and far-reaching effects, in Muddy River and beyond.

In luminous prose, Yiyun Li weaves together the lives of these and other unforgettable characters, including a serious seven-year-old boy, Tong; a crippled girl named Nini; the sinister idler Bashi; and Kai, a beautiful radio news announcer who is married to a man from a powerful family. Life in a world of oppression and pain is portrayed through stories of resilience, sacrifice, perversion, courage, and belief. We read of delicate moments and acts of violence by mothers, sons, husbands, neighbors, wives, lovers, and more, as Gu Shan’s execution spurs a brutal government reaction.

Writing with profound emotion, and in the superb tradition of fiction by such writers as Orhan Pamuk and J. M. Coetzee, Yiyun Li gives us a stunning novel that is at once a picture of life in a special part of the world during a historic period, a universal portrait of human frailty and courage, and a mesmerizing work of art.

Praise for The Vagrants

“She bridges our world to the Chinese world with a mind that is incredibly supple and subtle.”—W Magazine

“A Balzacian look at one community’s suppressed loves and betrayals.”—Vogue

About Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li is the author of four works of fiction—Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. A… More about Yiyun Li

About Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li is the author of four works of fiction—Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. A… More about Yiyun Li

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Praise

“Yiyun Li has written a book that is as important politically as it is artistically. The Vagrantsis an enormous achievement.”—Ann Patchett, author ofRun

“Every once in a while a voice and a subject are so perfectly matched that it seems as if this writer must have been born to write this book. The China that Yiyun Li shows us is one most Americans haven’t seen, but her tender and devastating vision of the ways human beings love and betray one another would be recognizable to a citizen of any nation on earth.”—Nell Freudenberger, author of The Dissident

“This is a book of loss and pain and fear that manages to include such unexpected tenderness and grace notes that, just as one can bear it no longer, one cannot put it down. This is not an easy read, only a necessary and deeply moving one.”—Amy Bloom, author of Away

“A starkly moving portrayal of China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, this book weaves together the stories of a vivid group of characters all struggling to find a home in their own country. Yiyun Li writes with a quiet, steady force, at once stoic and heartbreaking.”—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl

“There is a magnetic small-town universality to The Vagrants…but this is small-town universality with a difference. That difference is Communist China. The town isn’t small; it only feels that way, as a provincial city where everyone seems to know his neighbor’s business.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“Yiyun Li’s extraordinary debut novel [is] beautifully paced, exquisitely detailed. . . . An amazing technical achievement… . . . Li’s genius lies in her ability to blend fact with an endlessly imaginative sense of the interplay of forces that powered the massive shift in the social order that led to Tiananmen Square. . . . In this most amazing first novel, Yiyun Li has found a way to combine the jeweled precision of her short-story-writer’s gaze with a spellbinding vision of the power of the human spirit.”—Chicago Tribune

“She bridges our world to the Chinese world with a mind that is incredibly supple and subtle.”—W Magazine

“A Balzacian look at one community’s suppressed loves and betrayals.”—Vogue

“Li has poured her prodigious talent into The Vagrants. . . . Familiarity with Chinese history isn’t at all necessary to relate to the grief, pain, confusion, fear, loyalty, suspicion, and love portrayed by the characters in this deeply affecting story. . . . The Vagrants has a confident, democratic style that gives a distinct voice to every character. ‘Growing up in China, you learn you can never trust one person’s words,’ Li says. ‘People’s stories don’t always match.’ But one thing is clear: Li’s stories matter.”—Elle

Awards

American Library Association Notable BooksWINNER 2010

IMPAC Dublin Literary AwardFINALIST 2011

Author Q&A

Other People’s Stories Yiyun Li

When I was growing up in Beijing, in a two-bedroom flat shared by my parents, my grandfather, my sister, and me, the only good piece of furniture we had was a hardwood wardrobe, which my grandfather had purchased for my parents when they got married. The wardrobe was painted deep red, and on both doors were golden characters in the most elegant calligraphy.

I was an early and a late reader at the same time—early meaning I had begun, around age three, assigning sound and meaning to each of the characters on the wardrobe, and depending on the day and my mood the characters together would form different messages; late meaning that only when I turned seven did I realize that the words on the wardrobe were a quotation from Chairman Mao, calling all Chinese people to take on the glorious task of liberating the repressed working class around the world.

Once I knew the exact meanings of the words on the wardrobe, I lost interest in them and turned my attention to the outside world, though at the time the world offered little for a hungry mind—I would be thirteen before I was allowed into a library; there were not many books or magazines for a child to read except for the Communist Young Pioneers’ Weekly; on my parents’ bookcases there were old translations of Russian and Soviet novels, but the long and incomprehensible names of the characters intimidated me, and I did not pursue them until much later.

The discovery of the execution announcements thus came as much-needed education for me. From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, there was a surge of executions across the nation, and every week several new announcements would cover the old ones from the previous week at the entrance to our residence compound. I read the announcements—with trepidation at first, for fear of the grown-ups’ disapproval, but when my mother would read along with me on our walks to the nearby marketplace, I knew I could return to the announcements and reread them as many times as I wanted. I soon accumulated a vocabulary of legal terms such as “counterrevolutionary hooliganism.” Oftentimes, apart from the basic information about a criminal—name, sex, birthdate and birthplace, verdict— there would be a small paragraph of narrative about the crime, of - fering just enough details to make a child’s mind run wild with imagination. To this day I remember a few cases distinctly: in one, two brothers seduced newlywed women, persuading them to have sex with the promise of watching imported movies from the West, because they considered it less of a crime than seducing a virgin; in another, a teenager robbed a fruit peddler of his day’s earnings; in yet another, a group of young men and women were caught having parties where they learned yao bai wu—the Chinese name for “swing dance,” which had become a sign of new hooliganism under Western influence.

I spent the years between eight and eleven reading the weekly announcements; they became less frequent in the mid-1980s. Still, the huge checks in red ink (a sign for immediate execution) covering the black words on white paper, the golden national emblem on the announcements, and the official signatures stayed with me, and much later, when I became a writer, I would go back to the memory. Many of the death sentences, in retrospect, were unfortunate products of the era. It is my job as a writer to reimagine what was not given in those death announcements, just as once I had assigned meaningsand interpretations to Chairman Mao’s message on our wardrobe; it was awareness that the life and story of a real person could not be summarized in one paragraph on an execution announcement, along with other memories, that began my journey to the writing of The Vagrants.